National Poetry Day: "How Poetry Got Her Hooks In Me" by Andrew M. Bell

It is an ancient Poet

and he stoppeth me.

“Beware of poetry, my son,

She’s a gold digger.

She’ll chew you up and spit you out,

leave you penniless and lying in a gutter,

drunk on absinthe,

while the rich novelists and scriptwriters

step over you, laughing.”

“Hold off! unhand me, greybeard loon!”

Unheeding, I slunk off to my garret

to compose a villanelle,

heavily derivative of Dylan Thomas.

I only wanted to get girls,

but before I knew it

I was roaming with the Romantics,

bopping with the Beats

and cruising with the Classicists.

Popping some Pope, shooting some Stevie Smith

or hitting up Heaney,

I was hopelessly addicted.

And I never did get the girl.

Tuesday Poem: "Agog" by Andrew M. Bell

Mural in New Brighton: Artist Unknown

As I dreamt the voices sang

of war no longer waged.

The pitted scars had disappeared,

the global face had aged.

Poverty expired

in a ghetto in LA.

The morning found no corpses

on the footpaths of Bombay.

The wilderness revived

from the chimney’s stranglehold.

Harpoons sang no funeral songs

for those cetacean souls.

One’s sex no more a prison

and race a burden shed,

a man could not be tortured

for something he had said.

The nuclear threat was history,

our lungs were free of smog.

I woke in trembling disbelief,

speechless and agog.

Tuesday Poem: "Following Your Heart" by Andrew M. Bell

Amazing Mural in New Brighton: Artist Unknown

When the wind changes direction,

do your friends say that she is fickle?

Wheeling and soaring, the hawk searches

the sky's silent patterns for

whirlpools and eddies in the liquid blue,

following only the pulse of knowing that rises

in her breast and eye,

reading the ochre outcrops, the granite crags,

the shale shards and basalt buttresses,

the myriad forms of the thrusting, restless earth

that catch and shape the wind and sun,

melding invisible columns of power for the taking.

Fierce, steady eyes

scrutinise that patchwork of pIay,

tapping its effortless buoyancy

when the powerful sinew tires.

Like the hawk, you follow

the knowing,

wed to heart and bone

by the seamless lineage of trust and instinct.

That is the true voice

you hear

when you glide and ride

the pillar of easeful power:

the true voice

for the voices of your friends

can no longer be heard up here.